Sunday is the LGBT (hereafter, gay) pride parade in New York.
I am not gay.
But I am a fellow traveler. On their moral journey. As I said in “Get to Work,” if there is a chance to revive real feminism, the answer is in following the lessons the gay movement has taught. Indeed, everything anyone needs to know about social activism in these conservative times they can learn from the gay movement. Here are the lessons.

1. Everyone deserves to make a public life.
2. Everyone deserves to make a private life.
3. Everyone deserves to make a family life.
4. Sooner or later, tolerance must lead to real respect.

Early on, the gay movement brought and won a lawsuit to defend their right to associate . . . in public bars and restaurants. Gathering in bars and other public places, they made a political movement. After all, the founding fathers wrote the First Amendment for a reason. If people can associate, they can learn to act collectively. Politics can be born. Stonewall, which gays celebrate today, was a revolution in a bar.

From the gay claim to equal treatment in the public square, many things followed. That they should not be discriminated against in the workplace. Or in housing. Here and there, states and cities began to pass laws forbidding people to discriminate against gays in their public lives. Colorado passed a state constitutional amendment forbidding its legislatures to protect gay rights. Big mistake, Colorado. Even the Supreme Court wasn’t into taking peoples’ votes away. Struck down.

Even though the Court wouldn’t extend its equality mandate to gay sex for a few more years, in America, sexual change often occurs long before legal change. In state after state, the laws against sodomy were repealed or fell into disuse. Everyone deserves a private life.

Step three took a little longer and required a lot of dying. As others have so graphically described, the AIDS epidemic and the adoption and insemination movement meant that gay society intersected with every aspect of family law: births, child rearing, care for the dead, inheritance. When it became clear that the aspect of life governed by family law would forever victimize the unmarried, the gay marriage movement was born. Here’s the lesson: public life is not enough. Private life is not enough. For full human lives, people need fairness and equality in private and in public.

Why do feminists need to revisit these lessons? Because feminism has stalled at step one: the public life. Laws forbidding discrimination and harassment are now decades old. There are no sex-segregated want ads and sex-segregated law schools. Just like businesses keep extending benefits to the gay and lesbian partners of their employees, the dynamic of the market economy all works against penalizing good workers. But as the law profession approaches 40% female, the law partnerships are but 17% female. The business schools are 30% female, corporate management 20% female. The number of mothers with graduate and professional degrees entering the workplace has leveled off and may be falling depending on whose numbers you believe. They are homeward bound.

Why? A big part of the reason is that feminism has never fully changed the private, family life. The thickest glass ceiling is at home, where women do 70% of the childrearing and housework. The harder women work at home the less progress they make at work. Even liberals justify the arrangement by arguing that women are naturally destined for housework and child rearing because that’s what our ancestors, the monkeys, do. The women are taking family lives and giving up the public life. Gays and lesbians were offered the flip side of the bargain – public lives but no family life.The lesson is clear. Neither is a full human life.

But the biggest payoff to learning from the gay movement is inherent in the name of the parade: pride. At some point, maybe when the death toll got so high, gay activists realized what all activists must learn sooner or later. Tolerance is not enough. You must stand up and make a moral claim for the goodness of your life. In feminism, the tolerance strategy earned us “choice” feminism, in which anyone with a womb can call herself a feminist and claim that her choices are feminist because she makes them. In the gay movement, the claim for tolerance earned gays the 5 to 4 Supreme Court upholding the Georgia homosexual sodomy law on the grounds that we just don’t like sodomy.

In the years since, and culminating in the Supreme Court decision reversing itself on gay sex, what did gays do? They didn’t just say you must hold your nose and put up with us. They said we are moral human beings, doing no harm to anyone, seeking a flourishing human life, including physical and emotional connections like anyone else.

Women take heed: women are moral human beings, not just the descendants of monkeys. We deserve a flourishing human life, including both private physical and emotional connections, but including public power, honor, and independence. Just like lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgendered human beings. Go to the pride parade. Take a lesson.